One of Many
by Inari
Summary: Pregame. The Nameless One meets an old ally for the first time all over again.


**Disclaimer:** Planescape Torment and its characters are not mine, although I like to think that I would treat them well.

**Continuity: **A random incarnation of the Nameless One somewhere between Practical and our hero in the game. By rights Morte really should have been here too, so we'll just pretend he's been temporarily misplaced due to some adventure or other. People do seem to enjoy stealing him, the charismatic little jerk.

**One of Many**

In the forested hills, it is raining. It is the sort of rain that comes for an afternoon, somehow managing the neat trick of graying the bluest skies without dimming the sun, and in the soft-edged sunlight the rain turns everything green a thousand shades more vibrantly so. It has been thus for nearly an hour, with only the sound of rain-rustled leaves to disturb the sleepy warmth of the humid air. It is the sort of afternoon that most creatures of field and forest spend tucked away in nest and tunnel, in burrow and den, whatever cave or crevice they have claimed as their own, letting themselves be lulled into simple animal dreams while the world is washed clean.

The rain has its work cut out for it today, for there is a trail of blood and bloody bootprints leading up the curve of the hillside, the grass bent and broken in many places where something or other was most certainly _dragged_. The rain has its work cut out for it, indeed; there are a great many creatures in the forested hills who would likely find this a fascinating development.

Here, where the hillside curves just so, the occasional patch of bare jutting rock gives way to an opening some ten or twelve feet wide and less than half as tall: a cave carved into the earth by weather or long-vanished stream or by some beast whose life was claimed by some other beast, as lives in the forest so often are. At the moment, however, there are exactly three things in the cave, and none of them are particularly intimidating.

The greatest portion of the gore outside, turning the long trail of muddy grass scarlet, and inside - pooling in cracks in the stony earth, smeared in the occasional print of boot or bloodied hand - belongs to a man lying still and silent on the ground just out of reach of the rain. He is a tremendous gray mass of scarred and tattooed flesh, just this side of being taller and broader of shoulder than a proper human ought to be and well over on _that_ side of being much uglier. His torn, stained clothes are simple enough, the sturdy boots, faded breeches, dark shirt and cloak of a woodsman or hunter. Or a bandit. Indeed, for the last four months that is precisely what he has been, though the mangled leather armor he wears has surely seen its last battle and there is no sign of the axe that surely once rested in that loop on his belt.

Though he has left a great deal of his life's blood (and a few portions of other vital, messy things that really should never be on the outside of a person) out in the rain, he doesn't seem at all distressed about it. This is nothing surprising or particularly indicative of his character: the man is dead.

Past the dead man, a yard or so deeper into the shallow cave, there is another still form, both smaller and less scarred. She is young, she is (mostly) human, and she is also dead. Like the first she is clad in a bandit's muddied garb, and like the first her blood is _everywhere_. The strip of cloth tied about her head, covering her right eye, is clean; it has been a part of her wardrobe for much longer than the last four months. But the front of her shirt is nearly black with blood, drying and foul, the cloth tattered messily about the midsection. The gaping gut wound is only half-tended, an effort abandoned without fuss or fanfare when life abandoned her body.

The third figure in the cave, breathing raggedly against the wall, has never bothered to remember the dead woman's name and will not mourn her. Still, in four months she had never once bothered him or intruded on his privacy and he is grateful enough for that, in his way. He will repay her by forgetting her; in being forgotten, she will be free.

The third figure (too gaunt to be any living human) shifts position slightly (a faint hiss of pain dying unvoiced in his throat) and is still once more, watching the world outside. Rain falls on the green world, slipping from one leaf's edge to the next, and the next, and the next...the tendrils of sound have a way of gently slipping into the cracks in one's consciousness, a softer cousin of the crashing of the ocean or the roar of some vast alien sea. Rain falls on a warm, green, bloody world, and for a time that is all there is.

The third figure does not turn his head, does not start, does not so much as blink once extra in surprise when the dead man's voice croaks roughly in the humid air.

"Who the hell are you?"

His voice is quiet. "I am *known* as Dak'kon."

The rain falls for a while.

"Do you know who _I_ am?"

"No."

The rain falls.

"Well, shit."

The rain falls.


End file.
